Richard Holmes is one author I wanted to be, if I had another life, that is. His Footsteps surely belong to our list for the WALKING exhibition. Here is Holmes on Shelley:
In Act One of Prometheus Unbound, there is a haunting passage in which Shelley describes the "two worlds of life and death." Combining classical ideas of Hades, Platonic notions of the interne dreary spheres of daemons and the Dantean vision of the Christian Inferno, he suggests the existence of a world of "doubles," of "shadows" which repeat or mirror everything on earth, "all forms that think and live". These are not so much ghosts of the dead as ghosts of the living. We all have our doubles in this second world (the idea is most familiar nowadays in science fiction rather than poerty). Only at the moment of death or destruction are the real and the double united, "and they part no more." Thus to meet your double, or to see it attacking someone, signified imminent peril: death perhaps, or the invasion of the real, normal world by the world of shadows.
Richard Holmes, Footsteps (1985)
So that world co-exists with this one, not anywhere else but here, and it repeats everything that's happening here. The two are united only at the time of the former's destruction. Why then does the second exist? Only to show that the frist can never claim unicity. They are identical but for the fact that they are not the same. And this doubleness is the proof that you are alive... when dead, the two merges into one.
A very strange idea, indeed. Our life, being one, abhors its unicity. Or life, by its nature, needs constant differenciation. DIFFERANCE. We know how much Derrida was interested in British Romanticism.
